Xbox One Coming November 22 With Faster CPU

Last month Microsoft began tweaking the specifications of its yet-to-be-released Xbox One. Yesterday Microsoft’s vice president of marketing and strategy Yusuf Mehdi revealed the software giant is still boosting the performance of the next generation console and plan to release it on November 22, just in time for the holidays.

Previously, the AMD CPU was said to run at 1.6 GHz clock speed, but the company has now bumped this up to 1.75 GHz. Last month’s tweak focused on the console’s GPU, increasing the clock speed from 800 MHz to 853 MHz. The Xbox One will boast an 8-core CPU with 8 GB of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive, quite similar to its only and upcoming competitor, the Sony PlayStation 4.

“We recently just went into full production, so we’re now producing en masse Xbox One consoles. We’ve had real good progress on the system. In fact, we just updated the CPU performance to 1.75 GHz on top of the graphics performance improvement, so the system is really going to shine [and] the games look pretty incredible,” explained Mehdi at yesterday’s Citi Global Financial Conference.

According to Reuters, Microsoft plans to release its first new console in eight years one week behind the new Sony PlayStation 4. When it is launched, however, Mehdi said he expects it to be Microsoft’s “biggest launch by a wide margin.”

“We’ve built more [systems] than we’ve ever built for an Xbox launch,” Mehdi told Polygon.

Mehdi has reason to expect a large launch event; Microsoft has already sold out of preorder stock on the new Xbox console.

“We have more pre-orders than any other Xbox console releases in history,” said Mehdi. He did mention, however, that they have plans to produce extra units for launch day.

Microsoft announced the Xbox One in May during the E3 game-centric conference in Los Angeles. In that time, there have been several controversies surrounding the device that’s yet to arrive.

When the first consoles come off the production line, the software will not support any external storage, reports Ars Technica. For those hardcore gamers with extensive libraries, this could soon be a problem. As the Xbox One allows gamers to download their titles from the web and store them directly onto the console, space will become a precious commodity even if it will take some time to fill up 500 GB.

A month after the unveiling of the One console, Microsoft began backpedaling on claims it made concerning game sharing and selling. Initially the Washington-based company said it’d let the game developers decide if they wanted to lock their physical discs with DRM and prohibit gamers from selling or trading in their games.

Furthermore, Microsoft initially claimed One owners could share their titles with friends, but only those friends Microsoft felt worthy. Adding fuel to the fire, the original plan for the One was to have it check in with Microsoft’s servers before gameplay. Following a large outcry, Microsoft reversed this decision, readjusting gaming rules that will now allow the One to be played offline and let users share their physical discs with one another.